


Tallow, Tinder, and Rope

by Hlessi



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Kink Meme, Literary References & Allusions, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-09
Updated: 2013-11-09
Packaged: 2017-12-31 23:20:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1037593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hlessi/pseuds/Hlessi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bilbo Baggins has come back from his adventure, but home is not home and he is not the only one who has lost more than he knew he could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Response to [this prompt](http://hobbit-kink.livejournal.com/8973.html?thread=19926285#t19926285) over at the Hobbit Kink Meme.
> 
> This was supposed to be a PWP, but er, um.

There were nights when, after supper, Bard would pull on his coat and take up his knife and his bow.

When he was gone, Bag End seemed emptier than it ought to. For certain, much of the furniture was still missing, Bilbo would remind himself, but still, Bilbo would have to admit, there was in this particular emptiness a manner that had not much at all to do with furniture. This had been Bilbo's home all his life, and yet it had become queer to him in a way he could not explain. The familiar walls were too close, the stripped floor too wide, and there were too many shadows that he did not know, that hadn't been there before. As if his home had changed while he wasn't looking, as if there was something new in there with him that was not supposed to be. As if some of the dark had slipped in through the door as Bard had slipped out.

Bilbo would occupy himself with putting away the supper things, getting up some tea and leaving a kettle of hot water to simmer. He would read, either in his chair or in bed, which at the moment was just a lot of pillows and blankets over two mattresses on the floor of the biggest bedroom, until he was dozing more than reading. Then he would blow out his candle, despite the dark, he would tuck himself into a pillow that smelled slightly of tallow and fall asleep.

Bard would wake him. The arm around his waist, the hand on his back. Heat and hair and too-long limbs of work-rough skin, hard thews and a green, woodsy smell that seemed to take up more and more of the make-do bed until there was nothing for Bilbo to do except lift his head for a too-big shoulder, throw his leg over a too-big thigh, let the too-big Man do as he would because there was no room for anything else. Bard's dark head above his and Bard's bare, hairless feet sticking out over the floor.

Other times, Bilbo would wake to his shirt being pulled over his head, Bard's hand between his thighs, and there would be a while where neither slept.


	2. Chapter 2

Bilbo's death was a nuisance to him from beginning to end.

The most pressing problem was getting his presumption of death retracted. The Mayor in Michel Delving did not want anything to do with it, as, like all public officials, he hated to admit a mistake, and his clerks were even worse. Bilbo had the notion that a tidy sum had been made by all involved, from the tax office down to whoever had bought his mother's glory box for an old song, and no one was eager to have to give everything back. For a week, Bilbo had to look quite a few hobbits in the eye while they suggested to his face that perhaps he was just confused and hadn't realized he was actually dead.

It was so very disagreeable. So long as he was legally deceased, no one would feel obligated to give anything back, as the auction had been proper and lawful, and, more importantly, none of his income would be paid to him. This was a serious difficulty. He would not starve, as neither the baker, the butcher, nor the grocer seemed to have any qualms about extending credit to a dead man, but it was still a shocking experience to have no money, to, indeed, be, for the first time in his life, completely penniless.

“But you are not dead,” Bard told him. They were lying abed, their skins still steaming from the bath. “How can they say you are dead, when you stand living before them?”

“Oh, they know very well that I'm alive.” Bilbo was fingering at the fine black hair of Bard's chest. He had so much of it, as much as a Dwarf. “It's the money, you see. They don't want to give it back.”

Bard lay still, his eyes closed. Then, he said, very quietly, “They would wrong you for their own ends. These people of yours.”

Bilbo made no answer.

“People you have known all your life.”

_Oh, Bard,_ thought Bilbo. Thought, as he had thought so many times over the last six months, _You of everyone did not deserve what happened to you._

Bard's eyes opened. He looked down at Bilbo. “You are petting me.”

He was. The hair tickled against his palm. “My parents used to call each other that. Pet, I mean. It was disgusting. _Good morning, pet. How are you, pet. Don't shout at the mail, pet._ ”

“Pet,” said Bard, somewhat dubiously. It did not sound right, not from him. His northern tongue was too heavy for such a silly word, he bit the endearment in half.

Bilbo pressed his spread hand to Bard's skin and followed his fingers with his mouth. He put his own western tongue to use, against the hair, the stiff nipple, the notch in the belly, and further down, toward the thicker hair, the organ swelling up to meet him. He clutched at Bard's hips, tasting sweat and skin and the woods at night and something bitter, so much more bitter than only seed.

Callused fingers touched his ear, gripped his hair. Bard was murmuring Dalish under his breath.

There, with Bard's hand on him and Bard's cock in his mouth, listening to this dark, grim-faced Man speak his pleasure in a language as foreign to the Shire as anything elven, Bilbo hated no one, not even the dead Dragon, as much as he hated the Master of Lake-town.

He slept late the next morning, tired and reluctant to go out and try to contend with his fellow hobbits. He was sick of greed, in truth, and too low at heart to argue with anyone. He had wanted to come home and lock the door behind him, put Bard to bed and get in with him and not come out until the world promised to be a little kinder, or at least a little less cruel. He'd thought that they could hide themselves away and lick their wounds. But even the Shire had failed him, had not, despite his every reason to think it would, been the refuge it should have been, and he'd returned from his adventure only to find that it had taken yet one more thing.

Bilbo only realized that Bard had left when he came back again. The front door opened and closed, some things were set down, there was a heavy, booted tread on the naked floor, and then Bilbo was being pulled out of his pile of blankets by the ankle.

“Look at this, _pet_ ,” Bard told his foot.

Bilbo groaned. “I shouldn't have told you.”

There was a packet in Bard's hand, with two wooden covers and tied with string. When Bilbo opened it, he found that the very first page was an Official Retraction of the Presumption of Death of Mr. Bilbo Baggins, signed and sealed with the Mayor's own hand and seal of office.

He looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then he looked up at Bard. “How did you get it?”

“I asked for it.”

Bilbo waited, but nothing more was forthcoming, and Bard was looking at him as if he didn't understand the expression on Bilbo's face. “Go on.”

Bard rubbed at his neck with one big hand. “I told your Mayor that you were expecting some papers from him, and that I had come to get them. He begged my pardon, which I gave, and then I waited until he got them.”

_That can't be it,_ Bilbo began to protest, except he stopped himself and looked at Bard again.

He was almost too big for this hobbit-hole. Even Bag End had not been built with Northmen in mind. There were places, near the walls and at some of the lower corners, where his head scraped the ceiling when he was inattentive, and Bilbo was continually finding long, coarse black strands everywhere in the house, some of them pulled out by the roots. There were scuffs all along the walls, toward the bottom edges, and marking up corners and door frames. Two bedroom doorknobs had already broken off, and there was a crack in the lintel of the water closet. The corner of the parlor that had been put to use as an informal armory was scratched almost to splinters.

He could see it in his head. This enormous Man, in his heavy northern clothes and his heavy northern belt, his knife at his hip, walking down the road to Michel Delving in broad daylight. Scowling to scare crows, though that was just his face. Standing over the Mayor and informing him, in that growling northern accent, that he'd come for Bilbo Baggins's papers, please and thank you.

He probably hadn't said please _or_ thank you.

Bard looked so pleased with himself, in his own sober way. He was at least forty, Bilbo knew, and quite as middle-aged as Bilbo, but now there was an almost boyish expression on his face, the corner of his mouth pulled almost shyly up. He looked happier, or as happy as Dalish Bard could ever look, than he had in months. Tired, still, with something of grief yet in his eyes, but less of distance.

_Oh,_ thought Bilbo. _Oh. That's it. That's what he was missing._

He reached up for Bard's hand and pulled him down into the bed, and he did not care that it was the middle of the day. He was still only in his nightshirt, which was off easily enough, but he'd scarcely managed to loosen Bard's belt before the familiar urgency gripped them both.


	3. Chapter 3

The damp spring turned to wet summer. When it rained for the first time since they had been in the Shire, Bard stood in the garden watching the mild, sweet rain in disbelief until Bilbo complained that the Gamgees would take him for an overgrown hedge and come to trim him.

Bard said that such rain was the same as no rain at all, but Bilbo would not have it. He put Bard to work making a fire in the drawing room and dragging one of the mattresses from the bedroom while he brewed up a pot of tea.

Bard, Bilbo had learned, was a Northman down to his toes, which meant that he regarded anything that seemed too easy or comfortable with boundless suspicion, and some of the things he suspected were villages without walls, good weather, regular mail, and Bilbo's insistence that it was quite acceptable to sit inside of an evening with a cup of tea and do nothing in particular. He could not, or perhaps would not, understand it. He understood sitting down to eat, though that was still more of a necessity than a pleasure to him, and he understood fucking, but to sit before a cozy fire with a book or a pipe was a thing foreign to him, and offended his sense that if he had time to do anything, he ought to be withstanding some hardship.

“Not everything in the world needs to be a fight,” said Bilbo. “Did you never sit together and tell stories in—”

He could have bitten his own tongue off, but Bard only looked thoughtful. “We did,” he murmured, “but I am no—” He stopped.

Bilbo smiled up at him. “You were about to say _bard_.”

“We call them _shapers_ ,” said Bard stiffly. “Shapers of song and rhyme.” Then he muttered something under his breath that sounded like _drunks_.

“Then sit, _Bard_ , and tell me a story.” 

Bard eyed him. Six or more months ago, that glare would have turned Bilbo's stomach to water. Now it only warmed him, for he knew that look for what it was, and it only made him want to cheek this stern Northman even more.

The tea was set to one side, on the floor for lack of a table, and he went to sit beside Bard on the mattress, against the wall and close to the fire. Bard surprised him by taking his hand and pulling Bilbo into his lap.

“Shall I tell you,” Bard murmured into Bilbo's ear, “of the man Beow?”

Bard's unshaven jaw scraped at Bilbo's neck. He breathed in the woodsy smell of the Man's hair. “Oh, anything.” Bilbo laid his hands flat against Bard's shoulders, the wool rough to the touch. A big hand was holding him at the small of his back, and working lower, while the other was slipping a brace off his shoulder.

“So. We have heard of the prowess of the people-kings, of the—”

“Wait, what?” Bilbo pushed back from where he'd been about to lick. “No, at the beginning, please.”

“I—” Bard's hands stilled. “I _have_.”

“You have _not_. You said _so_.”

“So?”

“Yes, _so_. _So_ to imply that something else has already been said. _I_ have not heard of the prowess of the people-kings. Please begin at the beginning.”

Bard scowled. “This— _is_ the beginning.”

“Is not!”

There was a pointless struggle, and then Bilbo was tucked into Bard, legs wide to straddle Mannish hips. Bard clasped his hands over Bilbo's back, pinning his arms, and did not speak. The rattle of the rain on the windowpanes vied with the crackle and hiss of the fire.

Bilbo whispered, “I am sorry.”

“It is only a story,” Bard murmured.

“No.” Bilbo sighed into a shoulder. “I mean, I should not have talked of Dale.”

The stillness of him, then. The size and weight of him, unmoving.

When Bard finally spoke, it was in a voice of devastating calm. “Do you ever think of Erebor?”

Bilbo closed his eyes. He trembled.

Bard sat upright and pushed Bilbo off over one hip, and for a moment Bilbo's heart was breaking at the thought that he had finally managed to lose even Bard, but then Bard followed him down. Shirt and breeches were unbuttoned, his smallclothes undone, and when Bilbo was naked, his clothes heaped on the floor, then Bard had his own woolen shirt over his head and was loosening the points of his trousers.

Between Bard's thighs, his cock was jutting from the short black hair, already weeping. It was always surprising to Bilbo, this most tangible proof of Bard's lust for him, to think he had any sort of hold over a Northman born of lakes and mountains, snow and ice, who should have been a King. Over a man who had faced Dragon and Orc and treachery, who had carried a useless hobbit from one side of the world to the other and never asked why. Who had never blamed him, though he would not have been wrong to do so at least in part.

Only this time, instead of spreading Bilbo's legs or urging him onto his belly, Bard kissed Bilbo's knees before bringing them together and pushing his legs straight. Then he lowered himself over Bilbo, until he was lying atop Bilbo's closed legs with their cocks against each other. He reached between them to pull Bilbo's own cock up against their bellies, holding aside the privates, and then Bard was sliding between Bilbo's thighs.

The strangeness of it. Bilbo clutched at Bard's arm and waist and felt the blunt, slick head of the cock thrusting at the very center of him, somehow even more so than when it was actually in him. His eyes were of a line with a nipple, and he watched it in a daze as Bard fucked his thighs, as this massive body, with so much hair everywhere but where there should have been, sweated and strove above his.

His pleasure came on him almost without him knowing. He gasped and shuddered and spent himself between them, against the thatch of Bard's belly. Bard dragged the fingers of one hand through Bilbo's hair, pressed his nose to Bilbo's head. His thrusts stuttered, stopped. There was a hot rush between Bilbo's thighs and against his arse.

Bard collapsed onto him with a groan.

_King in the North,_ thought Bilbo, his eyes closed and his cheek pressed to sweaty, heaving, hairy skin. _Bard of Lake-town. Bard the Bowman. You should not be here. You should not be here. Oh, Bard, forgive me. Forgive me._

The weight lifted. Bard's bristly lips chafed Bilbo's face as they kissed the tear away.

Then he took Bilbo in his arms, facing him toward the fire, and put his mouth to Bilbo's ear. He did not seem to mind the mess.

“So,” he murmured. “We have heard of the prowess of the people-kings, of the spear-armed Dales, in former days.”


End file.
